Energy efficient communication solutions based on wake-up receivers

This chapter focuses on energy-efficient communication solutions that can be achieved by using an intelligent hierarchical network architecture that can be utilize in heterogeneous devices, collecting different types of sensor data from the patient’s body or environment, performing autonomous networking, and providing data for the databases of the internet of things. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and wireless body area networks have enormous amount of possible use cases in various fields. The WSN architectures can be roughly divided into two categories: flat and hierarchical. The chapter introduces an energy efficiency comparison of wake-up receiver (WUR)- and duty-cycle radios (DCRs)-based wake-up mechanisms. The intelligent hierarchical operation is assumed for both WUR and DCR approaches, that is the lower-layer devices of the hierarchical architecture are performing continuous sensing and will wake up the higher layers when required. In the DCR approach, each layer’s low-power transceivers need to wake up and sleep according to a predefined schedule.